Reddit Co-Founders Share How They Built the Front Page of the Internet With NPR’s Guy Raz

Yesterday, NPR’s How I Built This podcast released their interview with our co-founders Steve and Alexis, who sat down with Guy Raz last month to share the unfiltered story of how they founded Reddit.

The live audience at the Yerba Buena Center in downtown San Francisco along with thousands of listeners around the world had a chance to hear the story of how two first-year hallmates at the University of Virginia with a shared love of World of Warcraft and gas station sandwiches became best friends and co-founders of “The Front Page of the Internet.” Leaving no question unanswered, Steve and Alexis reveal the origins of “Snoo” (the internet’s favorite time-traveling alien and Reddit’s official mascot), discuss how their relationship has evolved over the past twelve years, and provide a glimpse of what the future holds for the over one hundred thousand communities that call Reddit home.

On Reddit’s beginnings

Guy: “You wanted to name it Reddit?” Alexis: “We couldn’t afford the name Snoo which is the name we wanted… the idea was people would ask, ‘Oh, what’s Snoo?’ and we’d say, ‘Exactly! It’s what’s new online.” Steve: “Instead, Alexis thought people would say, ‘What’s Reddit?’” Alexis: “I hoped people would say, ‘I read it on Reddit.’ Unfortunately, ‘Snoo.com’ cost $4000, which we didn’t have, and was a third of our funding. So, couldn’t afford it. Named the mascot Snoo instead, and then Reddit was available and was totally free. R-E-D-D-I-T. So that and the mascot were my key contributions.”

On growing the community

Guy: “Did you have a sense of how you were going to make it sustainable?”

Steve: “Not really. We weren’t really thinking in those terms, to be honest… We didn’t even really think of ourselves as a business. This was more of an adventure we were on… Once we had real users, it became ‘Let’s just not let the users down.’ And that was our mentality for quite a while.”

Steve: “Alexis and I were submitting all the content, and we had a rule back then that all of the content on the front page had to be less than 24 hours old. So sometimes we’d go to the site and it would just be white space. I had taken a day off for whatever reason, and in the late afternoon I remember thinking ‘Shoot, I haven’t thought about Reddit all day long’ and that the front page must be completely empty … and when I checked it was full of content from usernames that I had never seen before. That was the day when we realized this was a thing—these are real users. We’re not just propping it up with our fake accounts anymore. That was a really special day. I still get excited when I think about it because that’s when our motivation changed. That’s when Reddit was really born, I think.”

A packed house at Yerba Buena Center. (Photo: Jim McAuley)

On how their relationship has evolved over the years

Alexis: “We never really exercised the muscles that founders have to exercise, that best friends don’t … It’s great to be able to start a company with one of your best friends, but the conversations you have to have as co-founders are very different than the conversations you have to have as friends, and we didn’t have enough of the hard ones often enough and it was just unresolved and festered.”

Guy: “The two of you went to therapy together?”

Steve: “We did.”

Alexis: “When Steve pitched me on it he said, ‘Look, my therapist has a really good idea, let’s come together, and I was like ‘Sure, okay.’”

On what makes Reddit the most human place on the internet

Steve: “What we want Reddit to be is, in many ways, a reflection of humanity. Humanity is not perfect, but what you get on Reddit is an authentic representation of what’s going on in the world, and we believe that is very, very powerful.”

Steve: “One of the things that Reddit has taught me is that people are fundamentally good. People in large numbers want to help each other. When you put people together in the right context, they will do really incredible things. There’s no reason why that needs to be undermined by a bunch of assholes. It doesn’t mean assholes don’t exist, but we can make the conversation more balanced and that’s really been our focus ”

Alexis: “Consider 300 million people will visit Reddit this month. That’s almost as big as the population of the United States. The vast, vast majority of those interactions and engagements are never reported by another user and are either benign or actually good. If anything, it shows us how much more we have in common with each other than apart, because when you’re on r/skincareaddiction you don’t know anything else about the hundreds of thousands of other people talking about their acne scars other than the fact that you have the shared issue.”

Alexis: “Whether it’s about that, or putting arms on birds—r/birdswitharms—you find out that you’re weirdly not the only one who wants to put The Rock’s arms on a parakeet, and that’s okay because all people of all creeds should be able to come together and put Dwayne Johnson’s arms on a parakeet. Do you not agree?”

Guy: “I agree, yeah”

Alexis: “Would someone on r/birdswitharms put Guy’s arms on a bird? You’re welcome. Someone here is going to do it. Silicon Valley is a place where dreams come true, Guy.”